LTspice Goes OS X: Somebody Uses a Mac

This week, Linear Technology announced Mac OS X support for its LTSpice circuit-simulation software. LTspice, which now runs on OS X 10.7 and later, lets you simulate designs before committing to hardware and is available at no cost.

The fact that Linear ported LTSpice to the Mac came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I rarely run into an engineer who uses a Mac, at least for test and measurement. Sure, engineers have been using LabVIEW for the Mac, by National Instruments, since 1986. LabVIEW was originally developed for the Mac because DOS didnít have sufficient graphics support at the time. NI also supports hardware for data-acquisition and instrument control on the Mac.

I was unaware that test engineers used the Mac for anything but LabVIEW, so the LTspice announcement was a wake-up call. If you're a Mac user, tell us how to use it. Are there other engineering applications available for the Mac that you use?

As long as we're on the topic of non-Windows operating systems for test applications, do you use Linux for test and measurement? Linux is certainly popular for embedded applications, but what about for instrument control? I remember several years ago a pair of articles called "Get Those Boards Talking Under Linux," parts one and two, but that was quite some time ago.

it is easy for me to blame the OS, when I can directly compare win7 running the latest firefox to MacOSX running the latest firefox on the same exact hardware. One crashes regularly, the other is windows.

Please don't make me say that again, I feel so icky. Arguing over operating systems is silly. Like I said, I've probably just had bad luck.

"Personally, my experiences with MacOs have been horrid. I was a PC/Linux guy mainly. I tought video production using Media100 systems (apple) and they crashed constantly. I stayed away from apple till osX came out and eventually bought a macbook pro (I wanted a nice metal milled chasis!). The hardware is impressive but I had issue with software crashing all the time during video editing... again."

Software crashing? Why are you blaming the operating system instead of the application?

I mean, professionals use Avid video editing and audio production stuff daily on OS X and it all works and they make money using those tools.

I remember that article! It was pretty funny hearing people on both sides of the fanboy crowd arguing about it.

Personally, my experiences with MacOs have been horrid. I was a PC/Linux guy mainly. I tought video production using Media100 systems (apple) and they crashed constantly. I stayed away from apple till osX came out and eventually bought a macbook pro (I wanted a nice metal milled chasis!). The hardware is impressive but I had issue with software crashing all the time during video editing... again.

Ultimately I just installed windows7 directly on that machine and had no further issues till it decided to drink an entire cup of coffee.

Now I'm back on another macbook with macOsX and again, flash crashes, browser crashes, etc. I have bad mac luck I guess because everyone else seems to have nearly flawless machines.

I guess it must have been 5-6 years ago, PC Magazine did one of their periodic speed comparisons using a standard set of characterization software. A Macbook Pro running Windows under Parallels ran faster in all categories than the fastest PC at the time. That was quite an admission from the magazine's standpoint.

After having to use PCs during much of my engineering career, as soon as I had decided to retire early from the corporate world, I switched over to the Mac.

1. No more virus updates. No need to even run virus protection S/W.

2. No more crashing.

3. No more fiddling with drivers.

4. No need to replace hardware every two years, due to H/W failures.

This is not to say the Mac is perfect...but it's very close. For those arguing over the price aspect...all I can say is you get what you pay for. Anyway, I digress.

I run all the standard PC-based engineering design software under Parallels and "it just works". Parallels also makes it very easy to go from a Mac to PC application at the click of an icon. It also allows seamless transfer of files and folders from one environment to the other by simply dragging.

I believe S/W companies are finally realizing many engineers prefer moving over to the Mac platform and are starting to port their applications over.

LTSpice for OS X has been out for a few months now, and it works well.

And yes, engineers use Macs. NXP's LPCXpresso runs well on OS X, as do other Eclipse-based tools (Silicon Labs has made a little bit of noise about supporting OS X for their upcoming unified tool set). In the board layout area, Kicad actually works quite well (gEDA is a disaster, but that's true on all platforms).

So, yeah, we run Xilinx tools and Keil tools in a Windows VM, and the ability to run in a VM is now the excuse for not porting to native OS X. Macs are solid machines, no more costly than an equivalently-configured Dell box, and they work.